Björn Jeffery

I remember a sales call that I got a year or two ago. It was a news monitoring company that had a new sales pitch, since I had said that I wasn’t interested in their services previously.

Sales person: You know, now we even cover blogs!
Me: Really? What blog index are you using for that? [I was, admittedly, smirking]
Sales person: Index? We’re adding several hundred – every day!

She didn’t get a sale.

After the call, it occurred to me that the sales girl regarded blogs as any other media outlet: one that should be regularly monitored and followed on a daily basis. Arguably most people look at them that way. But as there is an abundance of interesting people to follow, myself and a lot of my friends suffer from RSS-anxiety – the “unread” figure is simply to high to handle. And we don’t won’t to miss out on anything?

For a while now I have started to think about this differently. An abundance of information, a scarcity of time. This miss-match will never be in balance however we try to adapt and evolve. As the publishing threshold is so low, the amount of “interestingness” produced will always surpass the time you can spend consuming it.

That’s why we need to regard blogs and microblogs as flow, not as regular media. Limiting ourselves to just follow a predefined set of blogs (just as we follow newspapers, tv-channels etc) is an inadequate way of consuming this new media. Unsurprisingly, it is the exact way we have consumed old media – we got a newspaper each morning and “followed” it. We had a tv-channel, and “followed” it too.

So how should we follow this new media more efficiently? I think it will be through combining selected voices that we never want to miss with sophisticated search strings and meme trackers. We need a system that tells us what we should be reading, rather than reading everything just in case. Sure, there are Techmeme and players like that, but we’re not quite there yet.

At Reboot last year Jyri Engeström said that if an article was interesting enough it would elevate through his social network with such a frequency that he knew he would find it interesting. That wouldn’t work for everyone, but it’s the type of logic that we need to be looking at if this information flow is going to be manageable. Social filtering together with aggregated data processing.

In DN today there is an article about Swedish politician´s blogs and that nobody is reading or commenting on them. In the light of what I’ve just written, the perspective of the article is warped. Why would loads of people regularly read or comment on the daily lives of a politician? The interesting thing is that once they do write something interesting, it can be found and become a conversation piece where they can choose to be a part. Having a blog gives them an honest chance of that. But the amount of readers and comments should probably not be among the key success factors when evaluating the project. The abundance of information and the scarcity of time makes that a tough challenge to handle for anyone, and even more so for a politician that is supposed to run the country at the same time.

So keep on blogging, politicians. There’s nothing wrong with just being part of the flow.

It’s hard to blog when you feel that you should add some sort of value to the ongoing conversation. Simply adding your two cents to a story is perfectly okay, but my firm belief is that the blogs that become influential are the ones providing analysis and insight rather than just opinions. You know what they say about opinions.

Because of this, many people start masking their opinions as analysis – and that’s where the trouble begins. Like I said, it’s okay to have both opinions and providing analysis, but the two should never be mixed up. Analysis often requires prior knowledge of the topic, experience and a good analytical ability do be able to dissect what has actually happened. This is quite rare, and the ones that have it often have reasons for not sharing their thoughts openly. Unfortunately, everyone simply can´t be transparent.

When I read blogs about the media industry I find this problem a lot. People write that old media is dead, that they should stop printing newspapers, that they should connect to the blogosphere more. I’ve written similar things to this myself. Whether they should or not is beside the point, but I would love to read a considerably more insightful analysis on WHY the answer should be one way or the other. And when I say insightful – I mean taking in all of the strategic considerations that are needed to be able to evaluate the situation. Things such as market position, profitability, brand building, competitors, revenue stream breakdown, current contracts that can’t be broken, timing. And many more. The evening paper Expressen made 144 million SEK profit during 2008. Why stop printing it? Sure, a lot of that profit came from DVD sales and so forth, but never the less – the newspaper acted as distribution for this new and innovative revenue stream. Therefore they would kill this revenue stream by stopping to print the paper. This may not be the winning argument to keep printing the paper, but it is a factor that needs to be taken into account when saying that media companies should cut their print editions.

I know I have often been guilty of mixing opinion with analysis myself. But I intend to get better. We need more analysis and more insight. And I, personally, will be cutting the RSS-feeds that have no further depth than just simply being there.

For all my Swedish readers, below is a presentation that I held at APG Sweden tonight. Together with Jonas I put together a string of ideas regarding the increasing connections between digital and physical. It was nice and liberating to talk to a group of people that appreciate and value the abstract and visionary, for a change.

Although the structure of the presentation needs some work, I think the audience thought a few of the ideas and examples were interesting. So I thought I would share it with you too!